In Brava magazine, July 2007
Around the Table
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach


RECIPE

Lemon Verbena with Peaches

“Lemon verbena is amazing!” says Jill of this, her favorite herb of all. “It makes a great tea, and it can be minced into fruit salads or tossed into the bath for a relaxing soak. I just love smelling it while wandering the garden. In tropical climates it’s a bush. It’s a tender perennial, so it needs to ...   more »

By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach

In Brava magazine June 2007
Around the Table


RECIPE

Pineapple-Cheddar Casserole

“This is one of my family’s favorites,” says Julie. “My daughter, Melyssa, and I make it a lot. It’s wonderful to bring to a potluck – a great side to burgers, hot dogs, barbecue, chicken and pork.  I just love it because it mixes the salty and the sweet together.” Julie notes that any cheddar aged at least one year ...   more »

By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In Brava Magazine, May 2007
Column: Around the Table

Recipe: Strawberry Scones

The other night for dinner, Vanessa Balchen made snapper, and according to her, it was “the best fish I’ve ever made.” So she told the whole world about it.

 “I rubbed it down with a mix of garlic, canola oil, cumin, and smoked paprika and then cooked it in a really hot pan with just a bit of oil,” she announced. She even took an enticing photo of her luscious entree, served on a salad bed of ...   more »

Recipe from Vanessa Balchen, Food Blogger
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In Brava magazine, May 2007

“I'm posting a scone recipe monthly. The whole family adores the strawberry scones at Lazy Jane's Cafe and I'm obsessed with recreating them at home,” says Vanessa. This version – her “third iteration,” as she puts it in appropriately geeky terminology – is creatively adapted from Baking With Julia by Julia Child and Dorie Greenspan. “Lazy Jane's scones are denser...   more »

Owner of The Dardanelles is a true “original” who also represents 40 locally owned Madison restaurants
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In Brava magazine, April 2007
Column: Around the Table

Recipe: Tortilla Dardanelles with Aioli

“Local, independent restaurants are where the flavor is,” says Barbara Wright, president of The Madison Originals, a non-profit association of over 40 restaurant members. “It’s where the cutting edge of regional cuisine is found – where it was born and where it’s preserved.” What makes local eateries so special? “The owner is almost always in the house. There are real   more »

By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In Brava magazine, March 2007
Column: Around the Table

Recipe: Toby's Supper Club's Super-Secret Salad Dressing

What’s a supper club? If you have to ask, you’re probably not from around here – and here what you need to know. No, supper clubs don’t have memberships (just like night clubs). No, they’re not open for lunch – they’re not called “lunch clubs,” now, are they? And if you want to look like an old hand at supper clubbing, head...   more »

By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In Brava Magazine, February 2007
Column: Around the Table

There’s something good cookin’ in the South Park Street area, one of Madison’s most culturally diverse neighborhoods. It’s home to a summertime farmers’ market, a variety of ethnic specialty grocery stores and great eateries offering authentic culinary traditions as far-ranging as Indian, Mexican, Vietnamese – and now, with the mid-2006 opening of Jada’s Soul Food, classic Southern Americana.

 Offering down-home fare like ...   more »

Recipe from Around the Table: Linda Clash of Jada's Soul Food
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In Brava Magazine, February 2007
Column: Around the Table

A savory, golden brown crunch through to a tangy, subtly sweet, juicy center: that’s the essential fried green tomato experience. “This recipe was perfected last summer when my craving and quest for fried green tomatoes led me to preparing them almost every day,” Linda says. “These will definitely be on Jada’s menu this summer!”

With the right combination of   more »

Once an at-home mom, Kathy Hughes has become president of a thriving business – and one of Madison’s foremost fishwives
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In Brava Magazine (formerly ANEW), November 2006
Column: Around the Table

Recipe: Day-Boat Scallops with Citrus Beurre Blanc

When you’ve spent most of your adult life as an at-home mom, what do you do after your three children grow up and your husband retires? Do you (a) retire to the suburbs of Miami and learn to play canasta...   more »

Fall's favorite treat complete with a great recipe
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach

In ANEW Magazine, October 2006
Column: Around the Table


You can often find Vivian Green at the center of a crowd, enthralling eager shoppers with information about the wares that fill her farm market stall: apples. Lots and lots of kinds of apples, bins of fruit ranging from deep red to green to rosy   more »

Renowned chef and cookbook author brings her vegetable love to Madison’s Food For Thought Festival
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach

In ANEW Magazine, September 2006
Column: Around the Table

Ah, food, glorious food. The flavor! The aroma! The justice!

Justice? What’s that got to do with food?

A lot, in a world teeming with side-by-side surplus and famine, where a few agribusinesses boom while thousands of family farms go under, where most of what we spend on food goes not to farmers but to ...   more »

 Traditional Chinese Medicine with a gentle touch
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In ANEW Magazine, January 2006

In the reception area of the Beijing Acupuncture & Chinese Herbal Medicine Clinic in Middleton, the air is fragrant with the stinging scent of Chinese medicinal herbs. On the counter a blue glass vase brims with fresh flowers of purple, yellow and pink. These blossoms have a bite, albeit a painless one: they’re snapdragons. If you were to ...   more »

The 2005 ATHENA® Award recipient’s lifetime of helping others, despite struggles of her own
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In ANEW Magazine, August 2005
Cover story

Kids, don’t try this at home.

Jody Glynn Patrick had made up her mind to wallpaper an ivy-patterned trim along the top of the upstairs hallway in her far southeast Madison home. The problem: one of the walls was also part of the two-story stairwell leading to the kitchen level ...   more »

Second-generation Attachment Parenting activist Bob Sears circles the wagons
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In Isthmus weekly newspaper, September 16, 2004

Bob Sears, M.D., has a lot to live up to as a pediatrician, father of three and champion of the high-touch parenting style known as AP, or attachment parenting. After all, it was his own father, pediatrician and parenting expert William Sears, M.D., who coined the term in the early 1980s.
For the last three decades, Dr. Sears the elder, with his wife, Martha Sears, R.N., have promoted gentle – but intensive – child-rearing practices that turn much mainstream advice on its head.

Examples: Toddlers can breast feed until...   more »

An unconventional business, Organic Valley Family of Farms has grown into a national leader in the organic movement.
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In Corporate Report Wisconsin, October 2003
Profile: George Siemon, Organic Valley's CEO

Needle-tart, refreshing, sweet: a delicate, complex play of juicy flavors bursts onto my tongue with startling directness, as if I’d pierced the skin of a just-picked fruit. My eyes widen. It’s organic grapefruit juice, freshly squeezed and packed into 1/2 ...   more »

By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In Minocqua-Woodruff-Arbor Vitae Area Visitor Guide, 2002

Why is a country doctor who passed away nearly half a century ago the hero of Woodruff? You’ll understand when you see the video at the Dr. Kate Museum.

Kate Pelham Newcomb, M.D. (1885-1956), affectionately known as Dr. Kate., was the daughter of Thomas Pelham, president of Gilette Razor Company. Against his wishes, she attended the University of Buffalo Medical School, earning her degree in 1917. She practiced medicine in Detroit until she and her husband, William Newcomb, moved to the clean ...   more »

Master of hospitality Craig Culver serves up the scoop on his dining niche and growing franchise chain
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In Corporate Report Wisconsin, June 2001

All is gold shovels, plaques and photographers at the ceremonial groundbreaking of the Culver’s restaurant in Winona, Minnesota, a town wedged on the narrow plain between the west bank of the Mississippi River and a set of craggy peaks still swathed in snow this sunny March day. A matched set of...   more »

Around the world in Madison: Lao Laan-Xang, Sole e Sapori, and Nadia's
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In Isthmus Annual Dining Guide, 2000

For a mid-sized city in the heart of the Midwest, Madison is lucky when it comes to dining out--and it’s not just because we have so many diverse restaurants serving dishes from all around the globe. It’s the exuberance and creativity of the people who run them. In bringing us their foods, they ...   more »